And just like that, it’s August. Time is flying by. People all over the world have been busy to create this release for you. This release again a ton of cool new stuff.

First, let’s talk entity IDs. Entity IDs are how we identify entities in automations and scripts. They start with the domain and end with an object id, for example: light.kitchen. Or, if you’re unlucky light.node_2_2_abc. With this release, it will now be possible to manage entity IDs of entities via the UI! Just as with changing the name, it requires that the integration is able to supply a unique ID for each entity.

Screenshot of the new user interface to change entity IDs.

This release also includes a bunch more Tuya integrations thanks to @huangyupeng. And thanks to @peternijssen we’re now also able to talk with Spider thermostats and plugs.

This week we heard that Guido van Rossum, the founder of Python, is taking a permanent vacation as the leader of Python after being at the helm for almost 30 years. Guido has not been directly involved with Home Assistant. However he created Python and was part of the team that built asyncio, technologies that power the foundation of Home Assistant and what makes us so fast and robust. Under Guido’s guidance, the Python community has grown out to be very friendly and open. A great inspiration for us and other tech communities out there. Thanks for all you have done Guido!

Paulus & Guido at PyCon US 2018

All right, back to Home Assistant. The last release introduced a tech preview of the new user system. The initial preview still required creating users via the command line. In the last two weeks, we’ve worked hard on adding support for an onboarding wizard and a user management interface. A walkthrough of the new features can be found below. Thanks to @awarecan and @jeradM for all their work!

To try it out today, read these instructions. The user system is still in tech preview. We’ve moved fast to get where we are today. The next step is that we need to take a step back and look at the system as a whole to make sure it’s robust and ready for prime time.

We keep seeing great examples of UIs built with Lovelace. Follow us on social media (FB, Twitter) where we will keep sharing great examples.

For the Lovelace changes in this release, check out the changelog. To help our development and design teams, we’ve also introduced a Lovelace card gallery.

I’m happy to announce that this release introduces support for Tuya thanks to @huangyupeng. Tuya produces cheap cloud-enabled devices that are sold under a wide variety of brand names across the globe, and now they work with Home Assistant too!

Today we are releasing 0.73.2 to fix a security incident. We’ve discovered that 9 months ago, with the release of Home Assistant 0.56, we misconfigured the SSL context that aiohttp used (PR). By trying to do the right thing (use an up to date cert store instead of relying on the system certs), we ended up doing the complete opposite: SSL verification was disabled for outgoing requests that were done using the shared aiohttp session. This is our fault, and not aiohttp’s faults. The impact of this is that certain integrations in Home Assistant have been susceptible to man in the middle attacks.

A man in the middle attack is when an attacker is able to inject itself between you and the server you’re communicating with, allowing it to read and alter the communication. The odds of this happening at home is very rare, yet we wanted to be transparent about this incident.

After research, the following integrations have been impacted. Although the odds are extremely small, we still suggest that if you use any of these integrations, to create new API keys or change your password.

If you are running Home Assistant on a system with Python 3.4, we’ve created a new release 0.64.4b0 with the patch applied. We have made it available as a beta. To install the pre-release run python3 -m pip install homeassistant==0.64.4b0.

After 4 months of hard work, we are happy to announce our new images for Hass.io, based on HassOS. HassOS is a brand new operating system that we have created specifically for the purpose of running Hass.io. And yes, this supports the Raspberry Pi 3 B+!

What is new

We have built HassOS on top of the [Buildroot] framework. The focus of the system is to be a very small and highly efficient operating system to run Docker like a hypervisor. It has just enough software installed, to run a supervisor. We have also focused on security, there are, for example, no default passwords and we use [AppArmor] to protect the applications and containers on HassOS.

Key features:

Safe and secure updating with [Rauc] over USB or internet (OTA)

Uses an LZ4 compressed root filesystem and parts of the memory

Read-only root filesystem, designed to run on embedded systems

Dbus connected hosts services

Latest LT Linux kernel

Latest Docker-ce version

Fully supported NetworkManager

Bluetooth support using Bluez

Supports lot different hardware

Migration

The design of HassOS is different from ResinOS. Because of this, we can’t provide an OTA update from the old ResinOS system to the new HassOS based system.

You need to perform the following steps to upgrade:

If you have installed the Bluetooth add-on, please remove it, since it is no longer required.

Make a Hass.io snapshot of your current system and download it to your computer.

Raspberry Pi: In case you have modified the config.txt (in the boot partition), you will also need to apply these changes to HassOS. Do NOT simply copy the file from your old setup into HassOS! Apply those changes manually!

If you use a custom network configuration or have configured SSH development access, you need to create a configuration [USB stick]. Copy the resin-sample into the network folder on a USB stick and insert it into your device.

Take the freshly flashed SD card with HassOS and place it into your device, and boot it by turning it on.

Copy the snapshot into the host with the SSH or Samba add-on.

Restore your snapshot via the Hass.io panel.

Done!

Future

HassOS is a wonderful base system and allows us to start working on integrating all kinds of amazing features into Hass.io (and bring them to the UI as well). For example, we are planning on bringing network and Bluetooth configuration possibilities into the UI. The goal is a full featured hub system that allows anybody to use Home Assistant.

The Hass.io API is extensive, and we are going to adopt more of its features into Home Assistant as well. For example, sensors that allows you to monitor the system usage of an add-on or even Home Assistant itself.

A big shout out to all people who donated money for us to buy hardware! Thank you! We have already started on making HassOS compatible with all kinds of hardware and are currently aiming to release support for new devices every 7-14 days and keeping this up until we support all major IoT boards.

Feel free to jump into the project and help us to improve the documentation or other tasks that are going to help us moving forward.

Today we’re releasing Home Assistant 0.73. First, let’s talk security. Home Assistant has a lot of power. It can control all devices in your house and know what you’re up to. That’s why securing it is very important. It’s absolutely wrong to connect your instance unsecured to the internet and hope no one will find it. All ports on all computers are regularly scanned by bad actors. Please read our guidelines thoroughly and follow them.

In the meanwhile, we’re also working hard on the new authentication system. A preview version is included in this release, more info on our developer blog.

This release also includes a TON of love for the new Lovelace UI. Yes, it’s still experimental but daaang, it’s already so awesome that you should probably just go ahead and try it out. Thanks to all the devs who have jumped on this: @c727, @ciotlosm and @jeradM.

I am super excited about this release as it brings some great examples of how we are refining the system to become more customizable and, at the same time, user friendly. The first thing that I am really excited about is a new experimental user interface that we call Lovelace. Check this awesome rundown of all the features by @ciotlosm. The TL;DR: a faster, more customizable and more extensible UI with the same look and feel as the old one.

Be aware, this is experimental, so things will change. However, we felt like we didn’t want to keep this away from you any longer. Check the Lovelace UI docs on how to get started. Make sure to share your creations!

Thanks to all the people that have been hanging out in the #beta channel on Discord helping development, finding and squashing bugs and making suggestions. Especially thanks to @c727 for all his development work and @arsaboo for being the first guinea pig.

Another change is that Nest, Sonos and Cast will now have to be configured using a config entry. Config entries can be created via the integrations page in the config panel. This is a concept that we have been developing for a couple of months now and it’s our goal to eventually use this as the way to configure all components.

Screenshot of the Nest config entry.

And as if this releases even needs more cool stuff, the Insteon integration now supports X10 thanks to @teharris1. It was a frequent requested feature from the Insteon community.

And finally, we’ll be extending the open beta for Home Assistant Cloud until the first of September.

0.71 has arrived. My favorite feature in this release is the conversion of the Nest component from cloud poll to cloud push. Sure, it’s still through the cloud but changes are now made available in Home Assistant as soon as they happen. Thanks @awarecan!

We’ve continued the frontend tweaks after the major overhaul in the last release. We’ve had some issues with the Hass.io panel on both Firefox and Safari. They have been addressed and all browsers should hopefully work again.

On the frontend side, custom panels have gotten some new tricks, including support for building panels using React. So if you’re a developer, check it out. And thanks to @c727 a lot more strings can now be translated. More info on how to help with translating the frontend can be found here.

HomeKit support also keeps growing. This release includes support for media players, automations and outlets thanks to @schmittx.

And in case you missed it, @OttoWinter has created esphomeyaml, which allows you to program and deploy ESP chips throughout your house by using a Home Assistant inspired configuration.yaml. Check it out.

The ESP8266 and ESP32 are dirt cheap WiFi-enabled microcontrollers that have established themselves as the base for many DIY home automation projects. Even quite a few manufacturers like iTead with their Sonoff devices have chosen these controllers because of their competitive price.

Setting up these microcontrollers for some basic functionality has also gotten really easy over the years with popular projects like ESPEasy or Sonoff-Tasmota: You just download their firmware and flash it onto your chip. But if you’ve ever tried to go a bit beyond the basic set of functions of those frameworks and tried to do some customization, you will have probably noticed that it’s not that easy. Often times you’ll end up having to download some Arduino code project from the internet and customizing it to your needs.

This is where esphomelib comes in: The esphomelib suite is a set of tools that are designed with the goal of achieving the best possible user experience. esphomelib a) allows for lots of customization without touching a single line of code and b) has complete Home Assistant integration. Inside the esphomelib ecosystem, you essentially just have to write a simple YAML configuration file. The rest like compiling, flashing, uploading etc. will then be taken care of automatically.

It’s time for release 0.70. It’s a little later than expected because of a major overhaul of how our frontend is build. It should not have any impact on how the frontend looks or behaves. Thanks to all the people running the beta who helped test this. Right now it looks like Firefox is still having some issues running the Hass.io panel. We’re working on releasing a fix for that soon.

If you’re using custom UI or Panels, some changes have been made. Make sure you run the latest version. More info on our developer blog.

Talking about our developer blog, this is a new blog with accompanying Twitter account. This is part of our ongoing effort of splitting content and interaction for users and developers of Home Assistant.

One cool new component in this release is Konnected (product page). It allows you to connect your existing wired alarm systen and plug it … straigt into Home Assistant!

Another cool one this release is Facebox. It will allow you to do local face detection on your camera feeds. Can’t wait to hear the cool things people will do with this.

Not much time to write a great intro this time as we’re hanging out at PyCon! Some fixes for the Hue and Wink colors thanks to @amelchio. Initial foundation for users has landed, it’s not anywhere near usable. We’ll keep hacking on it. Google Assistant for Home Assistant Cloud now supports room hints. This will cause Google Assistant put the devices in the right groups when you link your account.